Fred Schindler
IMAGE LICENSED BY INGRAM PUBLISHING
I worked in an organization that was threatened with being closed down by our corporation. I managed one of several departments in the organization. With the threat looming, my boss organized a meeting of all the department managers. We were going to spend an afternoon brainstorming—to see if we could come up with some great ideas that would save the organization. Can you guess how it went? Did we come up with any projects or concepts that convinced the rest of the company of our value? The evidence suggests that we didn’t. We were shuttered within a year.
I don’t recall much of the content of the meeting, and I certainly don’t recall any meaningful ideas being developed. Our organization had been a part of the company for decades. We’d had our share of successes and made plenty of contributions to the company’s business. Some of our contributions were critical to the success of the company’s most important products. But times had changed.
Business and economic conditions had become challenging, and changes in company leadership put our existence into question. We were a talented organization with plenty of brilliant people. Many of them were in that conference room. But our attempt at brainstorming did nothing to change the outcome. Was it the pressure of the moment that did us in, or was it the impossibility of the task?
Most of my good ideas have come under some time pressure. Think about writing a proposal for a new product or project. We get a set of new requirements and have a limited time to respond. That pressure can help to focus the mind. The objective is clear, but how to achieve it often isn’t. That can inspire some creative thinking. We might come up with a number of potential approaches to address the requirements. Of these new ideas, some are easy to abandon, but some merit further analysis. Breakthroughs can result.
Yet, we didn’t come up with any breakthroughs to save our organization. The problem we were faced with wasn’t a clearly defined one. Our objective was to come up with some generally valuable project ideas. If instead we were confronted with a specific technical problem, we might have had a breakthrough. We could have worked together to consider and refine approaches to solving that specific problem.
This reminds me of one of the fundamentals of successful entrepreneurship. The right way to start is by identifying a problem—to ask potential customers what problems they have. Look for significant problems—problems where a customer would value a solution. Then focus on solving one of those problems.
It’s much more difficult to be successful in the other direction, to start with a solution, and then try to find a problem it solves. It’s a challenge even if it’s a brilliant new idea. Let’s say you have an innovative new technology. First you need to find someone that could make use of the idea. Then you have to convince them that it solves a problem that they might not even think they have. Finally, they have to see sufficient value in the solution to give it a chance.
Whoever invented the wheel must have been trying to solve a problem. I doubt that person had an inspired vision of a wheel and then tried to figure out how to use it. It’s much more likely that they were trying to move something and were struggling with sliding it on the ground or pulling over a series of logs. They had a problem and came up with the concept to the wheel to solve it. Edison didn’t find a glowing filament and then realized that he could use it to make light. He wanted to make light, so set out to find a good glowing filament.
I’ve been involved in businesses where we’ve had some great ideas but struggled to convince anyone that it would be useful to them. Often the best-case scenario is that when they reject your brilliant idea, they tell you of a problem that is really vexing them. Then you can try to find a solution to that problem. With luck, you may even be able to adapt one of your brilliant ideas to address the problem.
The scenario was different when we were brainstorming ideas to save our organization. We didn’t really have a solution trying to find a problem. We had an organization trying to be a solution. Could we have saved our organization with a different approach? We could have started much earlier, looking for problems that were troubling other parts of the company. Then we could have brainstormed how to solve some of those problems.
Of course, that was what our organization was set up to do. We had contacts throughout the company and had a good sense of what problems the company had. So why didn’t our brainstorming session work? Was it the sense of desperation? Or was it inevitable that financial pressures on the company and the perceptions of company leadership led to our being closed?
There are good ways and bad ways to come up with ideas. Some ideas are better than others. Some problems are easier to solve than others. But some problems may be unsolvable. Even a valiant attempt may be an exercise in futility.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MMM.2023.3284710